Build a mobile website, with your mobile phone.. for free

This is a fascinating development. For context of the news consider this, today approximately 800 million people worldwide out of the 1.3 billion internet users, use their mobile phone to access the internet (and this way of measuring includes WAP access which some purists say is not the "real internet"). By contrast there are about 1 billion PCs in use, most of those are of course connected to the internet. And either later this year 2008 or early in 2009, there will be more people who access web content using a phone than using a PC.

So I also have to be clear, most who use a phone to access web content will also have a personal computer and use both. And most who use both, will tend to put much more traffic on their PC than their phone. So please do understand, the vast majority of web traffic today is still from PCs. Yet many countries report that more web access is from phones than PCs already today, from some of the most advanced countries like Japan and South Korea, to some of the least developed, like India and South Africa. Even in China, this week's Economist reports that 73 million people access the web from their phones (but in China more do access via a PC than mobile)

But consider the iPhone and others of the more advanced phones today, if this is 2008, and how rapidly phones evolve and with the 18 month replacement cycles of phones (vs 3.5 year replacement cycles for PCs), the game is remarkably tilted in favour of phones as access devices.

So then you ask, but what of those mobile web sites? Who makes them and with what platforms and using what software? That is where today's news comes in. A service called MobiSiteGalore has launched to offer mobile website building support. It allows direct design of the mobile website by using a mobile phone (cooooool...) and best of all, the service is free. If you think SMS and Twitter and Qik are bringing mobile users to participate in user-generated content to mobile data services, now we get mobile websites that any user can design, and they don't even need to have a PC to do it. They can do it right from their phones. Great idea.. Lets see how this develops.

Comments

[Alan Moore]

Think what this could do for places like Africa which seem to be exploding with mobile capability.

YOur point Tomi about mobile minutes as a currency is also very interesting and they said it could only happen in Japan.

Ha.

Alan